E. W. Godwin’s best-known designs are
those in which he appears to have escaped from the evolutionary dead end of the
Gothic Revival. The White House, Frank Miles’s studio, and the famous Godwin
sideboard with its spare, stark functionalism seem to have no precedents. Yet in
1858 Godwin believed
that a true, original Victorian style would emerge from the Gothic, not in
opposition to it.1 Godwin’s antiquarian studies ranged far beyond the Gothic,
taking him to Homeric and classical Greece, Celtic Ireland, eleventh-century
Denmark, and Saxon, Jacobean, and even Restoration England. “Archaeology”
permeated every aspect of his career. It was the foundation for much of his architectural,
theatrical, and journalistic work, and also for his interior design practice,
including furniture and textiles. The study of the past provided Godwin with
design ideas, introduced him to friends and clients, gained him a formidable
reputation as an “authority,” and gave him some splendid opportunities for
argument with his professional brethren. For Godwin it was more
than a professional necessity, it was an enthusiasm and a delight.

Gothic Revival architecture, in its
early phase, was a matter of decorative “quotations,” such as crockets
castellations, and pointed-arch windows with elaborate tracery, which were
instantly recognizable to laymen as “medieval,” applied haphazardly to forms
that were not. This romantic, picturesque approach gradually gave way to a more
scholarly use of
medieval forms in architecture. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Thomas
Rickman, John Britton, Robert Willis, J. H. Parker, and William Whewell, among others,
established a nomenclature, chronology, and classification for medieval
buildings, which, although the details were still being argued decades later,
provided a framework for the study and selection of architectural styles.2

Godwin was eager to establish his
credentials as a successor to these men, who had raised this branch of
knowledge to the “dignity of a science.”3 He stressed his own scientific methodology in his
antiquarian writing. For example, in a series of articles he wrote for the Architect in 1875, entitled “Old
English or Saxon Building,” Godwin emphasized the scientific nature of his
inquiry by appropriating the language of forensics: he listened to evidence and
called witnesses; he examined and tested them; he summed up and finally arrived
at a verdict.4 For
Godwin, however, antiquarian science was not an end in itself. It was merely
the secure foundation for the exercise of the imagination. Toward the end of
his life, he wrote that the study of the past was “a science that clothes and
reanimates the dead, and gives colour to the pale, shadowy forms of forgotten folk.
The purpose of the archaeologist is to bring before us those old times, to make
history a reality.”5 This remark
shows that Godwin’s response to the past was as close to the emotionally
charged historical romanticism of Ruskin as to the scholarship of the
pioneering “scientific” antiquaries.

Godwin spent part of his childhood
in a house called Earl’s Mead on the outskirts of Bristol. Its garden was full
of crumbling fragments of old buildings collected by his father William.6 One of Godwin’s
early sketchbooks contains undated drawings—a bracket carved in the form of an angel,
a gargoyle, and a fragment of a perpendicular window—which are labeled “Lower
Garden” and “in Upper Garden.”7 It seems likely that these objects were sketched
by Godwin at Earl’s Mead when he was a boy. Godwin’s interest in other
antiquarian studies, such as heraldry and costume, appears to have predated his
architectural pupilage,8 but his first serious forays into the study of the past
are inextricably linked with his architectural training. Godwin learned to be
an antiquary as part of the process of becoming an architect.

By the time Godwin began his
architectural pupilage, in about 1848, it was becoming accepted that knowledge
of medieval styles was an important part of an architect’s training and would
in all likelihood be a requirement of his practice. Several of the older generations
of architects, George Gilbert Scott and George Edmund Street, for example, were
already building in Gothic Revival styles firmly rooted in antiquarian
scholarship rather than in mock Gothic picturesque. There was a difference between
best practice and usual practice: throughout Godwin’s lifetime, architects and
builders continued to produce buildings consisting of incongruous mixtures of
medieval decoration stuck onto inappropriate forms, or of scraps from the many available
illustrated architectural pattern books, cobbled together with what Godwin
called “a most amusing disregard of conventionality, both of time and place.”9 However, for
the men at the top of the profession—and Godwin aspired to be one of them—scholarly
knowledge of the buildings of the past was a professional necessity. In Godwin’s
ledgers his membership fee for the Society of Antiquaries appears as a
professional expense, along with drawing materials and the cost of entertaining
clients.10

There were architects who considered
antiquarian study a waste of time. Godwin’s pupil master, the Bristol architect
William Armstrong, appears to have been one of them. In 1878 Godwin characterized
Armstrong as a “practical man.”11 He may have been remembering his own training
when he remarked that practical men “look upon archaeology with disdain and
talk of it as ‘an amusement all very well for those who have nothing to do,’ … believe
me, this is no fanciful picture, but, on the contrary, one drawn from the very
expressions that I have heard used.”12 Although Godwin did write of sketching
and measuring expeditions with Armstrong,13 it seems that as an antiquary he
was largely self-taught, initially from architectural books and periodicals.

Recalling his own pupilage, Godwin
published an open letter to architectural students in 1880, advising then on
suitable reading matter for their studies.14 In keeping with his imaginative,
romantic approach to the past, he said that he had learned more about the
ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance from the Bible, Chaucer and
Shakespeare than from books on architecture. He went on, however, to recommend
a selection of architectural books from which a pupil might learn the basic vocabulary
and grammar of Gothic. These books were his own foundation as a “scientific”
antiquary.

While in Armstrong’s office, in his
“first steady settling down to the study of Gothic,” Godwin had read “Parker’s ‘Glossary,’
Bloxham’s [sic] capital little book,
Rickman, Barr, and sundry serial works.”15 Matthew Bloxam’s Principles of Gothic Architecture, which
gave a selection of examples and then a chronological classification, was particularly
useful. Godwin suggested in 1880 that “What Bloxham did for Gothic architecture
might well be done for Chinese, Indian, Egyptian and other styles.”16 Godwin
also recommended publications that had careful, accurate illustrations, such as
Architectural Parallels (1848) by
Edmund Sharpe, and a series by Henry Bowman and J. S. Crowther entitled The Churches of the Middle Ages (1845-53).
Many of the standard books on Gothic architecture were
available in the library of the Bristol Society of Architects, which Godwin joined
soon after its foundation in 1850.17

At an early age, Godwin also began
to put together a small library of his own. Half of his £100 legacy from his father,
who died in 1846, “went to pay bills or a/cs at Booksellers incurred during
[his] minority.”18 This was a large sum of money, only just under half of
what an architectural clerk might earn in a year. Godwin’s purchases in about 184919
include Thomas Rickman’s Attempt to
discriminate the styles of architecture in England from the Conquest to the
Reformation, the book that had established the
nomenclature of Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles; A. C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture, with
text by E. J. Willson (four guineas for the two volumes); and the
volumes on Gloucester Cathedral and Wells Cathedral from John Brittan’s Historical and descriptive accounts … of EnglishCathedrals.20 Godwin noted the names of the engravers and the
illustrators as well as the authors. More than twenty years after
buying his copy of Pugin’s Specimens,
Godwin was still an
admirer of the “careful architectural drawings, with their dimensions clearly indicated, and their details elaborately and
scientifically displayed.”21 The engraver John Le Keux, who had collaborated with A. C. Pugin, was a particular
favorite, appearing several times on the list.

Good, accurate drawings were
important to Godwin. Although
he sketched extensively in England, he never traveled widely in Europe or
farther afield. He was one of the enthusiasts for Early French Gothic in the 1860s
but did not visit France until he was in his late twenties. He returned from
this trip with only one sketch, of shadow falling
on a string course.22 His most likely sources for illustrations of French
buildings are W. E. Nesfield’s book, Specimens
of Mediaeval Architecture, and the then-unpublished measured drawings by
fellow architect William Burges.23 Godwin did not visit Belgium and Germany
until he was in his forties. His brief enthusiasm for thirteenth-century Italian
Gothic, fueled
by Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, had relied on George Edmund Street’s careful
illustrations in Brick and Marble Architecture
in the Middle Ages: Notes of a Tour in the North of Italy (1855). Ruskin’s book was illustrated with beautiful,
almost impressionistic etchings rather than useful measured drawings. Godwin
never visited Italy, nor did he go to Greece, although he was to write
extensively on Greek antiquities. He did visit Denmark while researching architecture
and costume for Hamlet, but for his
articles on the painted decoration at Roda and Bjeresjøe churches he had to
rely on the illustrations in N. M. Mandelgren’s book, Monuments scandinaves du moyen-âge.24

Although Godwin studied other
people’s illustrations, he did not entirely trust their accuracy. He recognized
the potential of photography early in his career and gave a lecture to the Royal
Institute of British Architects in 1867 on the photographs exhibited that year
by the Architectural Photographic Association.25 Toward the end of his life,
he used photographs for reliable visual evidence in the creation of
historically accurate costumes for the play Claudian.26
Although he argued that students would gain more of an understanding of a
building by extensive sketching than by photography or the use of published
illustrations, he seems to have considered photography and sketching to be
complementary,27 and in his open letter to students in 1880, in addition to
his recommended list of architectural books, he advocated “the contemplation
and enjoyment—the critical examination and comparison of photographs and other illustrations of the best art works
of all times.”28

From books, photographs, and illustrations
Godwin learned to date and classify portions of buildings on stylistic grounds.
An early notebook, of about 1850-51, contains his architectural descriptions of
Sussex churches. It shows how he used his reference books while he was learning
this skill.29 He wrote
the descriptions from tracings of published illustrations rather than from the
churches themselves and backed up his work with measurements and quotations taken
from “authorities”: Parker, Bloxam, and Rickman.

Godwin’s reliance on other people’s
facts, measurements, and illustrations was to lessen over the years as he
accumulated a body of information from his own direct observation of buildings. His
earliest dated sketch, of the east window in the north transept of West Kington
Church, was made on May 12, 1849, when he was fifteen years old.30 His
earliest surviving sketch book, of 1848-5l, includes a “list of places to visit—1849.”31 An undated,
handwritten list at the back of an offprint of an article by Godwin of 1853 is
inscribed “Summary of Churches visited.” There are 145 locations, including
holy wells and crosses, in Bristol, Somerset , Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Cornwall,
Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, and Wales.32

Much of Godwin’s early antiquarian
work is undated, but it is possible to discern some development in his methods from
the time of the notebook on Sussex churches.

At some point between l849 and 185l, he began to
look in a limited way at original documents, taking some notes and measurements
from James Nasmith’s 1778 edition of William de Wyrcestre’s Itinerary, which is an important source
of information for Bristol’s early ecclesiastical foundations.33 Godwin began
to add his own initials to his lists of authorities consulted. In March 1852,
for example, he constructed “A Chronological table of the existing Wall bell-turrets
of England.” Of the eleven places on this list, Godwin had visited six. For the
church of Leigh de la Mere (which was one of the buildings Godwin had felt he
should visit in 1849), the authorities are listed as the Reverend J. L. Petit, the Builder,
and himself.34

Godwin also learned that other
people’s facts should be checked. Among his papers are two sets of measured sketches
of Saint James’s Church in Bristol. One is marked: “St James (according to
Dudley)” and the other is headed: “St James Ch. (according to J. H . & E. W. G.)” with
some small differences in the measurements.35 “J. H.” was James Hine, a fellow pupil in Armstrong’s
office and Godwin’s companion on a number of sketching expeditions, including an
antiquarian holiday in Cornwall in 1852.36

Hine was three years older than
Godwin, and it is a measure of Godwin’s remarkable precocity as an antiquary that
the two issued the prospectus of an illustrated series, The Architectural Antiquities of Bristol and its Neighbourhood, in March 1850 when Godwin was still only sixteen years
old.37 The series was intended to be published in six parts, although only
the first was issued, in 1851.38

The text of the book is unattributed,
but it is likely that Godwin contributed at least the section on Saint Mary Redcliffe,
in which the architectural description and classification are limited by the
space available. The historical information is very thin: “old chronicles of
the city” are quoted but not identified. One manuscript source was used,39 and the other information
came from the Chronological Outline of the History of Bristol (1824) by John Evans.40 Godwin contributed two plates: one showing the north
porch of Saint Mary Redcliffe, and the other, the porch’s carved capitals.
Among Godwin’s papers are several inked preliminary drawings which give
measurements and show sections of the moldings of the capitals and details of
carved figures and flowers.41 These do not appear in the published plate, however,
nor are they present in Godwin’s fine wash drawing from
which the plate was taken. Soon after this book was published, Godwin abandoned
pretty drawings in favor of “scientific” clarity. There is only one other example
of a published antiquarian paper by Godwin that is illustrated by drawings
without their accompanying “scientific” details or sections of moldings, or
plans, “A Notice of a singular and ancient coffin lid in St Philip’s Church,
Bristol,” which was also written in 1851 and subsequently published in the Archaeological Journal in 1853, the
first of eight papers that Godwin contributed to that journal between 1853 and
1865.42

The year 1851 was pivotal in other
ways as well. Following the publication of The
Architectural Antiquities of Bristol and its Neighbourhood, Godwin joined the Archaeological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland, which held its annual conference in Bristol in July 1851.43 Several
distinguished antiquaries contributed papers, including E.A. Freeman and John
Britton. Godwin himself read his short paper on the ancient coffin lid in Saint
Philip’s to the section of antiquaries at the conference.44 A temporary museum
was set up; among its exhibits were drawings of all of the objects in the Royal
Irish Academy. Decades later, in 1878, Godwin was to suggest the use of “some
combinations taken from some of the treasures of the Royal Irish Academy” in
the decoration of Princess Louise’s studio.45 The objects in the R.I.A. also provided inspiration
for some of the decorative designs at Dromore Castle in about 1868-69.46 A group of Danish
relics was shown at the Bristol Conference, presented by Jens Jakob Asmussen Worsaae,
a Danish historian and archaeologist who lectured at the University of Copenhagen.
In 1884 Godwin would consult Worsaae on the costumes of Hamlet.

The highlight of the conference, however,
was a lecture and demonstration on Wells Cathedral, given by the Jacksonian Professor
of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, Robert Willis, who was to
have a profound effect on Godwin’s development as an antiquary. Godwin may have
heard Willis lecture before this occasion. There is a suggestive concentration
of Oxford buildings in Godwin’s sketchbook of 1848-51, which may coincide with
the Oxford conference of the Archaeological Institute, held in 1850, at which
Willis had read a paper.47 Godwin was clearly familiar with Willis’s work in
developing a commonly understood architectural nomenclature when he used
Willis’s term “scoinson arch” to describe the inner arch of the east window of Colerne
Church in a manuscript paper of October 1851.48 That he had heard Willis lecture is also obvious from
Godwin’s obituary of the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, in which Godwin
refers to “the many who used to listen with bated breath to Willis’s wonderful
lectures at the annual outings of the Archaeological Institute … ” and to “the
professor’s brilliant demonstrations.”49

Williss method was characterized by
its emphasis on documentary sources of information. His first step before
beginning to examine a building was to lay a foundation of historical facts. He
would consult the existing written records: the fabric-rolls, estate records,
and muniments. From these documents he produced a chronology of the building
works. Once he had this information he would study the building
itself. Willis’s second characteristic was a reluctance to make dogmatic
statements without proof. He would build evidence, piece by piece, until “at
last he had succeeded in deciphering [the history of the building] beyond the
possibility of mistake … ”50 Thirdly, his study was unusually thorough, and
he was praised in his obituary as a “demonstrator of the anatomy of ancient
buildings … not content with the ordinary vague recognition of one portion as
thirteenth century and another as fourteenth, and so on, he strove to discover
the portions which each individual had directed, to trace the place where the
work had been abandoned, and to detect by small peculiarities of design or
workmanship the resumption of it by a different hand.”51 From Willis, Godwin
acquired a methodology, a respect for original documentary sources, an increased
concern for “scientific” accuracy in antiquarian study, and a penchant for
anatomizing (rather than merely classing) buildings. “If a building is worth
your study at all, it is worth dissecting,” Godwin wrote in 1878. “Take your
subject to pieces.”52

During the 1850s Godwin gradually—and
rather unevenly at first—adopted Willis’s methods. In October 1851 he wrote a
minutely detailed “Architectural Description and history of Saint Peter’s Church
Colerne Wilts.”53 In its
favor, the paper demonstrates Godwin’s close observation of the fabric of the
church. Otherwise, it reveals Godwin to be rather cavalier with dates and
careless to the extent of wrongly identifying the name of the dedicatee of the
church—it should have been Saint John the Baptist. He is also dogmatic in his
conclusions without presenting any of the underlying arguments. In a later
paper based on this study, dated August 1855 in the text and published by the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History
Magazine in 1857,54 Godwin
revised the essay, cutting it considerably and adding a section that shows him
attempting to use Willis’s methods. In the 1855 revision he mentioned that he
had “not been able to look into the Acts of William de Colerne, Abbot of
Malmsbury” but had consulted the Colerne muniments in the possession of New
College. He also noted, however, that “in the absence of all
documentary evidence relative to the history of this church, we are obliged to
refer to the character of the architecture for the dates of the several
portions.”55 He did
this quite successfully, pointing out the junctions between later and earlier
masonry, and where he could not prove his points, he was careful with his phrasing,
using “it appears,” “it is not improbable,” and “it is more than probable” to
signify the uncertainty.56

There are traces of Willis in
several of Godwin’s papers of the 1850s, but the full flowering of his influence
came in the early 1860s, when Godwin revived the moribund Bristol Society of
Architects and began to organize excursions, with lectures and demonstrations, along
Willisian lines. The first excursion, in August 1862, was to Wells Cathedral,
on which Willis had lectured in 1851. There followed excursions to Queen
Charlton and Chew Magna, Exeter, Llandaff, churches in Somerset, Salisbury and Gloucester
cathedrals, Chepstow and Caldecott castles, and sites in Bristol itself. Godwin
lectured on almost every occasion, and several of his papers, notably those on
Wells, Exeter, and Gloucester cathedrals, show him duplicating Willis’s practice
and referring frequently to Willis’s own remarks on those buildings.57 In a paper on
Bristol Cathedral, in which Godwin attempted to “dissect its various styles,”
he not only came to the conclusion that “archaeology is not fully satisfied unless
we fairly estimate the traditional and documentary evidence,”58 but also
managed to upstage the professor by arguing that doubts raised by Willis in 1851 at the Bristol
conference as to the extent of the Decorated-style rebuilding of the cathedral
at the time of Edmund Knowle could have been cleared up by consulting William de
Wyrcestre’s Itinerary.

A great many architects sketched
and measured: the process was part of training to be a Gothic revivalist and an
architect. Many also published papers on antiquarian subjects. Godwin stands
out from the majority of his contemporaries for several reasons. There was his
enthusiasm for the study of the past which was captured by a writer for the Western Daily Press in a report on one
of the Bristol Society of Architects’ excursions, during which Godwin “led at a
slapping pace … [and] dashed into his subject with such impetuosity” that he left most
of his followers behind. The reporter caught up at the site of the Pithay gate,
where he found “Mr Godwin, a lighted cigar in one hand and a silk umbrella in
the other … describing with great spirit” surrounded by puzzled locals. After a
long walk, “Mr Godwin had now been talking … for more than three hours—during
which the lecturer’s attention never flagged, and his umbrella seldom failed to
point out some object of interest.”59

This enthusiasm explains another way
in which Godwin began to diverge from the norm among his contemporaries. He
increasingly made forays into documentary, literary, and manuscript evidence
for their own sake as well as to complement his studies of the fabric of
buildings. In 1875, the year
of Willis’s death, Godwin published the series of articles entitled “Old
English or Saxon Building.”60 These essays are characterized, like Willis’s papers,
by their reliance on
documentary evidence, the thoroughness of the research, and the step-by-step methodology. Godwin claimed to have
“personally examined … every page of more than two dozen manuscripts.” Where he was unable to see original
documents—such as the original ninth-century plan of the monastery of Saint
Gall—he consulted as many
copies as possible, passing comment on the “inaccuracies of omission and
commission” on the part of the great French architect and antiquary Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and the
architectural writer James Fergusson.61 When he consulted facsimiles, not originals, he was careful to
say so.

The subject of Saxon architecture
was a difficult one, and Godwin, in his interpretation, was going against the grain
of contemporary thinking. Fergusson had questioned whether “any such thing
existed as true Saxon architecture,” and J. H. Parker had argued that before the year 1000 the Saxons
had constructed only in wood.62 The “witnesses” were already well known; individually
they had been dismissed as unreliable.63 What Godwin did in his paper was to reexamine the
whole question in a rigorous, thorough and methodical way, eliminating as many
of the potentially unreliable secondary sources as possible. The most striking characteristic
of this research was the extent to which the documentation eclipsed the evidence
provided by actual buildings. This was only partly an accident of survival.
Godwin had gone further than Willis by not only looking at building rolls and
such contemporary illustrations as there were, but also at literary sources. He
was convinced that historical truth
underlay poetic license.

Godwin’s literary sources for Saxon
building included two rather fanciful histories, two poems, and an account of the
miracles of Saint Swithin. These, according to a reviewer in the Examiner, might on their own have been
dismissed as “mere rhetoric” or “poet’s manufacture.”64 Used in
conjunction with the documentary, pictorial, and built evidence, however, this
literary evidence began to look much more substantial and was crucial in
establishing Godwin’s theory that the Saxons did indeed build in stone, and
that several features believed to be characteristic of Norman architecture were
present in the earlier buildings. It was a triumph of methodology, and the same
writer in the Examiner noted that the
evidence had never before been examined with “so much method or fullness.”65

Godwin’s early antiquarian papers
were mostly published in specialist archaeological and antiquarian journals, and
they are, frankly, rather dull. The “Old English or Saxon Building” series,
while fiercely erudite and self-consciously “scientific”—Godwin never did wear
his learning lightly—have a dimension that the early papers lack. The foray
into literature marks a fusion of Godwin’s romantic enthusiasm for the past
with his intellectual appreciation for the dry, accurate antiquarian science.
This process had begun in 1871-72 with articles on “Geoffrey Chaucer as Clerk of the
King’s Works,”66 “Spenser’s
Castles, &c” and “Kilcolman,”67 and continued in 1874 and 1875 with a series of thirty-two articles entitled “The
Architecture and Costume of Shakespere’s [sic]
Plays.” By 1886 Godwin’s
literary enthusiasm had begun to overwhelm his “scientific” methodology. In
that year he published “The Greek Home According to Homer,”68 an essay that
was fundamentally flawed by its overreliance on literary texts.

What the Victorians believed to be
two epic poems written by a man called Homer are now considered to be late
versions of long-surviving orally transmitted poems, composed anew in each retelling and
subject to inevitable interpolations over the years between their first
appearance and the time at which they were written down. The texts are a difficult and unreliable
source to use as history. Godwin was well aware that “it is in … pieces of
collateral evidence that so much value lies as it enables us to separate the real
from the fanciful not uncommonly confronted when one source of information is
too much insisted on,”69 but the collateral evidence known to the Victorians—that of archeology—was also flawed. Godwin’s
reading of the text of the Homeric poems made him extremely dubious about
Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of the hill of Hissarlik in Turkey, the supposed site of Troy.
In 1875, in spite of Schliemann, Godwin decided to “take Homer’s colouring
of things as tolerably literal, after allowing for poetical license,”79 and he did not
change his opinion even after Schliemann had lectured in 1877 at the Royal
Institute of British Architects and explicitly stated that it was not possible
to reconcile Homer’s descriptions of Troy with what he had excavated.71 In fact, neither
Schliemann’s archaeology nor the Homeric poems are reliable, but Godwin chose to give far greater
weight to the literary evidence than to the archaeological, which is a reversal
of the common hierarchy of evidence that insists on the primacy of physical remains.
In “The Greek Home according to Homer,” Godwin attempted to draw conclusions
about the plan of Odysseus’s house at Ithaca based almost solely on internal
textual evidence in the Odyssey and
the Iliad, accepting archaeological
evidence only where it upheld his theory.72

By contrast, one of the earlier
“literary” studies shows Godwin’s hierarchy of evidence working properly. For
his article on Edmund Spenser’s castles, published in 1872,73 Godwin had seen and sketched Kilcolman castle,74 and the
information from Spenser’s poems came lower on the scale of reliability than
the evidence of Godwin’s own eyes. Discrepancies were placed firmly at the door
of the poetic imagination. In his work on Greek architectural antiquities,
Godwin did not have the wide-ranging practical and primary knowledge of the subject
that he demonstrates in his antiquarian studies of medieval buildings.

Enthusiasm for the past had carried
Godwin into areas of antiquarian study that were not immediately relevant to his
practice of architecture . He did believe, however, that “archaeology” was a
useful, even necessary, adjunct to architecture—a sister science, perhaps. The
nature of the relationship between the two was a problem with which he and all
the other revivalist architects had to grapple. Godwin’s lectures and articles
are full of warnings against the misuse of archaeology in architectural design:
“I have always maintained that we must have a little of it, only to help us
recover certain principles of our art which have been lost, but, on the other
hand, it is quite possible that we may have too much of it; that instead of its
leading us to think for ourselves it may entice us into an almost boundless
ocean of antiquarianism; instead of its bringing out our own powers of design
it may make us mere collectors and transcribers of the designs of others.”75

This anxiety lies behind Godwin’s
most striking divergence from Robert Willis’s method of studying old buildings.
Like Willis he studied, classified, and recorded buildings, but one writer noted
that, in addition, Godwin had “struck out a somewhat new line for himself, for
he has ventured to criticize the work of our forefathers with a courage, which,
were it not based on sound judgment and wide knowledge, would be called
presumption.”76 Willis was
not an architect, whereas Godwin approached buildings from the point of view of
a practitioner.

Godwin’s lectures during the
excursions of the Bristol Society of Architects are a mixture of Willisian “dissection,”
critical aesthetic commentary, and practical instruction. An excursion in 1864 to Gloucester
Cathedral found him occupying the “unpleasant office … of fault finder to the Bristol
Society of Architects” and employing some splendid invective such as “paralytic
masonry” and “architecture in fits” to describe some portions of the building
in a lecture entitled “Notes on Architectural Design Illustrated by Gloster [sic] Cathedral.”77 The title gave notice that the antiquarian excursion
was to have a practical architectural purpose. Toward the end of his lecture,
Godwin asked: “If the instruction and warning which the Cathedral of this town has
offered us today be rejected. … If the architectural design as exemplified in
Gloucester Cathedral is to be of no use to us what business have we here? …. our
excursions had better cease.”78

The purpose of a critical appraisal
of an old building was to distill “principles” of architecture from which the architect
could then develop his own designs. Godwin suggested that the principles to be
learned from Gloucester Cathedral were those of simplicity of arrangement and
of proportion and muscular development, by which he meant the relationship of
the solids to the
voids, “in a word, the power of the design.”79 There were parts that were to point a warning: in
particular the overrichness of some of its ornamentation.

The idea of copying principles
rather than forms or motifs was far from new. A. W. N. Pugin had suggested it, as
had Scott, Street, Burges, and a number of other writers on the Gothic Revival.80 In a sense it
was the only possible theoretical solution to the problem of a revival that
aimed for both archaeological accuracy and originality. For Godwin this was the
legitimate use of antiquarian study. In 1871, writing on the Gothic Revival, Godwin stated that “No
amount of mere form will give us a
living architecture. We must have the maison
d’être, the principles of the construction of that form manifested.”81

Theory and practice, inevitably,
came adrift from time to time. Godwin did borrow “scraps” from buildings and
incorporated them almost unchanged into designs. For example, a gatehouse design
for Dromore took the corbelling of its machicolations directly from Kilmacleurine
Castle.82 Godwin also borrowed the triangular ornaments on the facade of
Northampton Town Hall from Ruskin’s illustrations of the archivolt on the Duomo
of Murano 83 and used similar motifs in his pulpit at Saint Christopher’s
Church in Ditteridge. A shop doorway sketched by Godwin at Saint Lô, Normandy,
and published in the Building News84 appears, slightly
altered in proportion, as the front door of the parsonage at Moor Green,
Nottinghamshire.85

The temptation for Godwin to copy
directly from old buildings was undoubtedly fueled by his habit of extensive sketching
and measuring. He admired his friend William Burges for his powers of
“adaptation and assimilation” and for his ability to be “an evolutionist or developist
rather than a revivalist.”86 Burges had borrowed an idea from the thirteenth-century
French architect Villard de Honnecourt, which was to eschew the careful,
accurate antiquarian measured sketch in favor of creative sketching. There are scattered
examples of this in Godwin’s own sketchbooks, such as a design “after a church
I saw at Rothersthorpe. July 25.68,”87 or another, suggested by a building he had seen at Cadgwith
in 1861,88 or two
designs for fountains, one “After Burges” and the other suggested by a fountain
in a manuscript Godwin had seen in the British Museum.89 This was an attempt
to use the past creatively for design ideas and inspiration rather than merely
as a source to copy.

Godwin warned against another danger
of archaeology, stemming from overenthusiasm for the past. In 1872 he wrote,
“To the delight an artist would naturally experience as each new treasure of
embroidery, furniture, armour, jewellery, &c, dawned upon him, may be
traced many of the anachronisms in the best of our modern Gothic works.”90 He added
dismissively that “there is a certain boyish romance about all this, no doubt
… ,” as if he had never himself indulged in this, or any, enthusiasm. Godwin
was particularly prone to the anachronisms he attributed to overenthusiasm for
the past. At Castle Ashby he designed a kitchen garden with vast pier walls
topped by tiled coping. After Dromore, his mind may have been running on Irish
castles. One sketch in a letter to Lady Alwyne Compton of September 20,
1867, shows a fortified, battlemented wall several
feet thick. A flat-coped wall seemed to Godwin “a most objectionable thing as
it is easy to scale.”91 Lady Alwyne remarked in her memorandum book that “the
‘herbary’ … was a device of Mr Godwin who delights in Mediaeval subtleties—The roofs
to the walls are said to make too much shadow … he did not consult the gardener
here, who disapproves of them.”92 In 1878 Godwin admitted to having fallen into the trap of
anachronism, by creating designs that were archaeologically correct but
functionally flawed. Neither Northampton Town Hall nor Dromore Castle were appropriate
to the age. An archway at Dromore, which might have been all right for the
period of Edward I, “was decidedly too low for the time of Queen Victoria. A
four-in-hand … could not go in there.”93

By 1879, a year after he had written this critique of his own
work at Dromore and Northampton, Godwin was well aware that he had broken out
of the straitjacket of the revival and built something full of “art and
originality,” and “different to
the conventional.”94 These buildings, to which he owes much of his fame
today, were the studio houses in Tite Street, and especially those he designed
for Frank Miles and James McNeill Whistler. Godwin’s continual harping on the
theme of learning “principles” rather than borrowing forms perhaps provides a
clue to the sudden and surprising emergence of his acclaimed “proto-modern”
studio designs. Gloucester cathedral and Frank Miles’s house appear to belong
to entirely different worlds, yet it is precisely those qualities Godwin most admired in Gloucester95 that appear in
the studio design: muscularity, balance, simplicity of arrangement, and the
pleasing proportions of solids and voids. Another lesson of Gloucester had been
that these qualities could be ruined by over-elaborate decoration. In the
facade of the first design for Frank Miles’s studio, the decoration is restrained,
and used sparingly.

In his
lecture entitled “Studios and Mouldings,” published in 1879, Godwin wrote
about the influence of Greek antiquities on his design of Whistler’s White
House: “when we talk about architecture as a fine art we mean refinement,
finesse, gentleness; and these qualities we can always trace in Greek mouldings.
At Whistler’s house there is an entrance doorway in Portland stone, in which I have
endeavoured to express these ideas.”96 Godwin explicitly linked the study and understanding
of the principles of Greek work and thirteenth-century Gothic with the evolution
of an “architecture of the future.”97 He also implied that his studio designs
were the first step in that evolution.

There is a certain irony in the fact
that the Metropolitan Board of Works, which rejected the first design for Frank
Miles’s studio house and forced Godwin to alter his design for the White House,
was advised by the architect George Vulliamy, who had signed Godwin’s
acceptance papers welcoming him as a promising new member of the Archaeological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland nearly thirty years before, in 1851.98

Furniture design did not have to
carry the weight of theory that Godwin applied to architecture. There were no jeremiads
about the perils of archaeology or anxieties about where the Gothic Revival was
taking its adherents. Beyond a few mild remarks about stop chamfers, Oxford
frames, and cabinets with shrinelike roofs having had their day,99 Godwin had
no qualms even about reproduction. His furniture designs run the full gamut,
from strikingly original to outright and unrepentantly imitative. The “Shakspere”
(sic) furniture set included a
sideboard with turned pendants below the canopy, which owed its general
appearance to the seventeenth-century press cupboard. This was considered “original”
enough to be the subject of a patent registration,100 whereas the
armchair in this set was a
reproduction of a chair said to have belonged to Shakespeare.101 Another
suite of furniture manufactured by William Watt to Godwin’s designs was “of
English character … to the close of the fifteenth century.” It was exhibited at
the Royal School of Art Needlework, South Kensington, in 1884, and one writer
noticed that it included several pieces of reproduction furniture, including a
fireplace from Haddon Hall.102 By contrast , the “Jacobean Oak Sideboard” published in
the Building
News in 1885 has Jacobean
elements—such as the cup-and-cover moldings on the legs, the acanthus brackets, and the pendants below
the canopy—and precedents can be found for the open-rail doors in the upper
portion, but the proportions and the central
leg give the piece a strikingly unusual appearance.103

Godwin’s use of the Greek klismos
form—a type of chair with splayed curved legs and a curved back originating in
ancient Greece—shows the same range, from copyism to creativity. He sketched an
example of a klismos from a vase in the British Museum104 and made two designs
which are near-reproductions: one appeared sketched into the courtyard of
Godwin’s design for Lillie Langtry’s house, and the other is in an undated
sketchbook.105 Two
small tables designed by Godwin have the exaggerated sabre leg that is a
feature of the klismos, and the influence of the form can be seen in a design
for a washstand in which the curve of the legs is continued up into the towel
holders at the sides of the piece in much the same way that the curving stiles
of the klismos continue past the seat to form the back rest.106

In decorative design Godwin seems to
have been happy to plunder the past for design motifs and to use ideas without
reference to the media in which or on which they were originally expressed. A
carpet from Holbein, which Godwin had sketched from the Handbook of
Painting, became
an idea for a wall decoration.107 A Greek
floral meander from an archaic Greek jug in the British Museum was used on a
design for a toilet set made in about 1876 and reappeared as a diaper in a wall decoration.108 In the same
wall decoration, Godwin used a palmette motif from an archaic Greek three-handled
jar, which reappeared in 1878 in cast iron on a Shillit and Shorland fireplace in Frank Miles’s studio.109 A design for a frieze of tiles was taken directly from
a border in the Arundel Psalter, which also provided a series of diapers and decorative
circular motifs that Godwin suggested could be used in the painted decoration
of buildings.110

This archaeological kleptomania is
mitigated by Godwin’s strong sense of design. Frank Miles’s fireplace is often assumed
to be Japanese in inspiration (and is, in composition). The pattern on the left
is archaic Greek, and the one on the right appears in a sketchbook as
“Indian.”111 Two
“scraps” and a compositional idea have been welded together into a coherent,
harmonious, original design.

This fireplace also demonstrates the
wide range of Godwin’s knowledge. In 1878 he dispensed the following advice to architects: “Be
archaeologists— … know all about the past; study Greek, Gothic, Renaissance,
the Roman and later developments, study it in all its different phases and
countries … Study all; take what good [you can] from every country and every
age; but work in no particular style.”112 The ambition to “study all” inevitably compromised the
depth of Godwin’s antiquarian studies and collided with one of his
characteristics as an antiquary, that is, the impulse to categorize, catalogue,
and organize. This had shown itself during Godwin’s pupilage, when he had compiled
endless comprehensive lists of antiquarian information. In the 1850s, rather
than merely reading Spenser, he had “read and re-read, indexed and annotated”
the book in company with an old schoolfellow.113 His instinct was to be comprehensive.

Depth and range are difficult to
achieve together. Godwin’s published oeuvre as an antiquary is mostly journalistic,
and in this, he did achieve range. His articles on Shakespeare’s plays alone
required him to have a working knowledge of the architecture and costume of a
large number of different periods in different countries. His surviving papers,
however, also contain the bones of a number of failed, overambitious books: one
on armor (which included every example of Greek armor depicted in the vase
rooms of the British Museum); another on Irish Antiquities; another, which
consisted of a “catalogue of all the illuminated MSS in the Brit. Mus.
annotated and illustrated by me.”114

There was also a book on his
earliest antiquarian enthusiasm:
historical dress. In 1875 he wrote, “Even with the elaborate Dictionnaire of M. Viollet-le-Duc before
me, with Jacquemin’s effective plates,
with the splendid work of Hefner, I am inclined to think that the history of costume has yet to be
written.”115 However,
as a writer in the Standard pointed
out in 1882, this work would require “not only a certain historical faculty,
but a knowledge also of the outlines of history and of the details of dress in
every country throughout the world.”116

This was too great a task for one
man, and Godwin’s 1884 publication, Dress
and its Relation to Health and Climate, although it was wide-ranging lacked
sufficient depth to be the book. The Standard further declared costume to be
a study “which, unlike most others, can be followed more advantageously by a
Society than by a single individual.”117 In 1882 Godwin founded the Costume Society, which held its first meeting
in his chambers in July. From the start its aim was publication, and at the
initial gathering Godwin was asked to get estimates for lithographic printing
of 2,000 copies of a sample illustration.118

There was no shortage of published
illustrations of costume already available, but Godwin complained of the
“incomplete and disjointed condition of things.”119 There were isolated drawings in publications such as Archaeologia and the Archaeological Journal, and in books on
armor, on ecclesiastical costume and monumental effigies, and on classical and
medieval dress. The many sources of information were too widely scattered to be
helpful to the occasional users such as painters, sculptors, theatrical
managers, or actors looking for information about how to create a historically
accurate costume. One aim of the society, therefore, was to circumvent the
confusion by gathering examples in one place and acting as an advisory body.
For a small fee, an inquirer would “receive with out unnecessary delay a coloured
drawing showing him precisely what he wished to know.”120

Another problem at the time was that
the published works available were riddled with mistakes. In 1880 Godwin listed
“some of the grosser errors” in the English edition of Lacroix’s book on costume
which was “we are sorry to say, in the hands of a large number of students.”121 In 1875 he had
reviewed the first volume of J. R. Planché’s Cyclopaedia of Costume, which was “marred by woodcuts which are bad as
woodcuts, bad as drawings, and bad as illustration of the subject.”122 Planché had
ignored “the three great, real, trustworthy sources for the illustration of costume,
viz., sculpture, painting, and MS. drawings” and had used large numbers of
woodcuts taken from copies.123 The Costume Society’s published drawings were all to
be taken from original sources, and their fidelity to the originals was to be
directly and personally verified by expert members of the society.

The research was intended to be
useful. The Standard pointed out that
“painters and designers of costumes for the stage are the two classes of
artists who should derive most advantage from the labours of the new
Association.”124 Godwin
had previously attacked both groups. In his theatrical criticism he had devoted
as much energy to denouncing historically inaccurate costume and mise-en-scène as
to discussing the acting. In 1875 several painters exhibiting at the Royal
Academy had come in for some vitriolic criticism on the subject of their depiction
of dress, which Godwin considered to be “travestied … vulgarised … [and] ludicrous.”125 To be truly
useful to painters, sculptors, actors, and managers, the Costume Society had to
be both accurate and comprehensive.

It was an enormously ambitious
project, even for a group that would eventually include some three hundred
members and subscribers.126 This was nothing less than an attempt to “further a
complete and scientific knowledge of historic costume.”127 The list of
members and subscribers of 1883 reads like a Who’s Who of the British artistic,
theatrical, and museum worlds, and included distinguished honorary foreign
members and a number of institutions.

At the first general meeting of the
society, Godwin had argued that “we should be careful to remember that we are a
scientific society for the purpose of research and teaching, and not for the
purpose of issuing pretty pictures.”128 There are hundreds of drawings of costume among
Godwin’s papers that testify to this aim, including the published plates, which
are signed by the copyist and certified by another member.129 Usually these signatures were those of
Godwin, E. Maunde Thompson (Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum),
and Burges’s friend the Baron de Cosson, whose particular interest was armor.

The costumes are depicted in
outline, without shading, and the lines are often much clearer and cleaner than
those of the original sources. In a painting in the illuminated manuscript
called Arundel 38, for example, a strip of ermine that conceals the fastenings
at King Henry V’s neck was painted over by the original illuminator whereas the
Costume Society drawing shows the trimming—the correct mode of dress—and erases
the visible error made in the original.130 In the plates still at the proof stage, the concern for
accuracy shows itself in corrections made to the drawings: the border of the mantle
of a figure from the Tiberius C.vi manuscript has been annotated “to be made
more accurate.”131 A
drawing of Saint Sebastian, from Carlo Crivelli’s Madonna della Rondine altarpiece in the National Gallery, is marked
for slight alterations to be made to the buttons on the collar.132 Most interesting
of all is a drawing of two figures on tracing paper, which shows the Costume
Society at work. It is covered with annotations by Godwin and the painters
Henry Woods and Luke Fildes: “?what is here on the belt / an open buckle with tongue / can this
ornament be made out? / pearls I think HW / Where do these taps and points come
from? / Impossible to say. I believe they come through sleeve.”133 Most of the questions
are in Godwin’s handwriting.

The society published only one
volume, The Costume Society, which
was published in 1883, although plates were prepared for a second volume. The
publication was flawed in several ways: it was almost exclusively medieval;
there were too few depictions of female dress; and, as Baron de Cosson pointed
out, the drawings were “to my mind too Archaeological and not sufficiently
artistic.”134 The
baron reminded Godwin that there were many subscribers who took part in the
society simply “to look at the plates,
rather than to make use of them.”135 There were too few subscribers and consequently too
little money. The last dated meeting of the office holders of the society was
held in July 1884. A meeting was called for August, but it seems that by then
the society had collapsed.

It may have been in response to
Godwin’s work with the Costume Society that Arthur Lasenby Liberty decided to
employ him as a consultant to Liberty’s newly opened costume department. The text of the department’s
advertising material
might have come straight from Godwin’s book, Dress and Its Relation to Health and Climate, stating that the
craft of dressmaking should be established upon some hygienic, intelligible and
progressive basis.”136 In
addition the department was set up “for the study and execution of costumes
embracing all periods, together with such modifications of really
beautiful examples as may be adapted to the conventionalities of modern life
without rendering them eccentric or bizarre”137 One of these costumes, which appears
in Liberty’s 1893 catalogue as “Norman 12th
Century,”138
is based on a design by Godwin.139 This is taken from a statue Godwin had sketched at Chartres, with
additions from other sources. The bodice came from a statue of Queen Clothilde,
which was situated over the door of Notre Dame de Corbeil. The decorated border
at the neck was taken from a textile found at a tomb at Notre Dame
in Paris. The girdle belt was from an
example illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire
raisonné du mobilier Français. Although this sketch design survives among Godwin’s
collection of Costume Society drawings, it does not properly belong there among the accurate perfect1y transcribed
copies of images of historical dress but relates more closely to Godwin’s work as a theatrical designer
and consultant.

If the
Costume Society demonstrates the science of archaeology, Godwin’s work for the
theater demonstrates the art. In 1885 in an article in the Dramatic Review, Godwin wrote that the
purpose of the archaeologist was “to make history a reality” but added that “the stage demands of
the antiquary
something more than this. Stage pictures of the past times should be treated … as life itself is treated
by the dramatist. The
archaeologist, in a word, must be an artist.”140

In 1874 and 1875, Godwin published
his most extensive work of
theatrical archaeology: a series of articles in the Architect entitled “The Architecture and Costume of Shakespere’s
[sic] Plays” in which he attempted to “fix” the time of each
play and discussed the appropriate historical sources for staging and costume.
Above all, in this series of articles Godwin argued that productions should be designed rather
than just researched: “the mere archaeologist is not all that is wanted. There
must be joined to the antiquarian knowledge more or less of the architects’
skill in composition or design; for although every detail of a scene may by
itself be correct, it may so happen that in the aggregate the individual bits
of even careful archaeological research may be dominated by the absurdity of
the general construction.”141

In his articles on Shakespeare’s
plays Godwin did not confine himself to discussing the static visual mise-en-scène,
but also commented on matters that touched on the acting and directing. For
instance he claimed that the manners of the period of The Merchant of Venice “were characterised
by courtesy combined with a stately dignified action, and that what we call
stiffness of manner was then regarded as quite correct,” adding that
“correctness of costume, and scenery, and properties, and furniture is all very
well, but if, through it all, we see nineteenth-century action, modern style, …
then the picture must be discordant, and the dramatic representation woefully
incomplete.”142

Archaeology, then, was merely a
foundation for theatrical art, and the aim of the art was what Godwin called
“the illusion I long to witness.”143 By this he meant a production with
costume, scenery, and properties all historically accurate and in harmony with
each other, and the actors’ gestures, bearing, speech, and stage business so
natural and unstagy in the historical context that the illusion of reality was perfect. Occasionally he could glimpse isolated parts of this
illusion in the contemporary theater. Of a production of Macbeth at Sadler’s Wells theater, he wrote: “The costumes
here and there were strangely true; one waiting woman might have walked out of
the pages of Cleopatra C.viii, or Claudius B.iv.”144 What Godwin wanted to see in the theater was history, living
and breathing.

What Godwin lacked, however, was
control of the production. Much of his design work for the theater consisted of
costumes for individual actors and actresses, where a single point of
archaeological accuracy was all he could hope to achieve. The harmony of the
whole was beyond his control. In these circumstances there was no concern to make
the costumes “so natural as to be unobtrusive,”145 even though he had insisted on this point
in his Shakespeare articles. In 1875, for instance, he designed a costume for Ellen
Terry to wear as Juliet. In a letter to her describing the design, he wrote, “I
have made the thing as swell as possible too swell perhaps for history’s sake.”146 Godwin’s
careful listing and quoting of sources in his Shakespeare articles leaves the
impression that his costumes were largely reproductions of the illustrations in
these sources, but his detailed description of Juliet’s clothing for the ball
scene shows him creating a costume. The headdress, for instance, was to consist
of a gold band with white daisies at intervals, over a caul made of pearls and
gold cord.147 The
band of daisies was an idea taken from an illuminated manuscript in the British
Museum.148 In the original, however, the band was a ribbon with small red
roses at intervals. The caul is a more elaborate version of one depicted in a
different illumination in the same manuscript.149 The two originals had been
altered and combined by Godwin to form a new design.

Godwin’s ambition to create the illusion
of living history on the stage was hampered by his relative powerlessness as a
consultant archaeologist. The programs for John Coleman’s production of Henry V at the Queen’s Theatre in 1876 credited
Godwin with the “superintendence” of the archaeology of the play, but in a
letter to Coleman dated September 2, Godwin listed a number of mistakes made by Coleman
which “outrage not merely history but common sense.”150 These had not
been corrected by the first performance, and Burges’s subsequent cannonade in
the Architect criticizing the archaeological errors in the piece,151
which is usually considered a tongue-in-cheek dig at Godwin,152 was most
likely set up by Burges and Godwin together in order to give Godwin a chance publicly
to disclaim responsibility for most of the mistakes. Godwin’s letter to Coleman
demonstrates how little he was able to exert any authority as a mere
“superintendent” of the archaeology. He even felt he ha d to apologize for
sending a list of suggested changes, writing:
“I wish to avoid as much as possible even the show of interference.”153

That this changed in the 1880s was
due partly to Godwin’s
increasing reputation as a theatrical “authority.” In 1885 Godwin
recounted how, many years earlier, he had to threaten the leading actress in an unnamed production, telling her
that “my name is published as responsible for the historical accuracy of the representation, and if
there is anything on the stage opposed to my designs, I shall not hesitate to
say so in print.”154 Godwin’s situation in 1885 was quite different:
“Now-a-days … I do not threaten to write to the papers. My work is known fairly
well by this time.”155 Even so, Godwin often did have recourse to the press.
It was a brave actor
or actress who asked him for advice and then ignored it. An anonymous review in the British Architect probably
written by Godwin discusses the costumes of Romeo and
Juliet worn by Mr. R. B. Mantel and Miss
Wallis. The reviewer praises the former, who had worn his Godwin-designed
costume, and pokes fun at the latter, who had not worn hers.156 Godwin was equally capable of praising or
condemning the theatrical managers who controlled the visual ensemble of productions, and this ability tended to
reinforce his archaeological suggestions. The general climate was also changing: the 1880s and 1890s
were the apogee of “archaeological realism” in the theater, with contributions
from Lord Leighton, Professor Warr, Henry Irving at the Lyceum, and Wilson Barrett at the
Princess’s Theatre.157
Barrett and Godwin collaborated in 1883 on the archaeological tour-de-force, Claudian. Unlike Coleman, who had made a fiasco of Godwin’s “superintendence” of Henry V, Barrett allowed Godwin to have considerable control over
the archaeology of the production.

Godwin wrote an account of his
researches for Claudian in the form of
an open letter to Barrett, which was published in the British
Architect and in pamphlet form.158 His main problem
was his reliance on secondary sources. Although Barrett was to fund Godwin’s trip to Denmark
to research the
costumes for a production of Hamlet
in 1884, a journey to
Istanbul was clearly out of the question. “I wanted to go to Byzantium for Claudian,” Godwin said rather wistfully to an interviewer from a contemporary journal, “but that is rather far.”159

Godwin’s methodology with his theatrical
research mirrors that of his architectural research. He aimed to find good
copies of contemporary illustrations if he was unable to see the originals.160
The most important source of information for costume was found in the reliefs
on the pedestal of the obelisk of Theodosius in the Hippodrome at Constantinople.
For these he consulted A. Stuart Murray, a friend at the British Museum, who
recommended the illustrations of the pedestal in Seroux d’Agincourt’s Histoire de l’Art. Murray wrote, “you will
find the engravings much behind what you would like: but I can’t think of any
better & have seen much worse. Photographs would not be easily got.”161 A
handwritten list of “Authorities”162 documents Godwin’s attempts to overcome
the problem of relying on secondary sources and to test his witnesses. He did
find a photograph of the obelisk of Theodosius. He duplicated certain work, using
several sources for comparison purposes, such as O. Gebhardt’s edition of the Codex Rossanensis for
examples of borders, which he compared with borders in the Codex Alexandrium.
The British Museum contained Godwin’s most important primary sources of
information. In his pamphlet on Claudian,
Godwin acknowledged that he had had to use published illustrations but added “where possible to me I have gone
to the objects preserved in our museum cases belonging to the period: e.g., swords, spears,
shields, axes, personal ornaments of gold, silver, bronze, precious stones,
cameos, & c.”163

After the production, a caricaturist
rather unfairly satirized the eminent archaeologist and the interfering and ignorant
manager, who attempted to alter the “S.P.Q.R.” of the Roman banners to an alphabetical “P.Q.R.S.”164 In
fact Barrett seems only to have discarded two of Godwin’s archaeological
creations—a litter and a red and purple tunic with appliquéd decoration that
Barrett refused to wear, “fearing it to be much too garish.”165 Godwin had
adapted the tunic from that of “a little Roman bronze warrior in the British
Museum.”166

In his book Resistible Theatres, John Stokes argued that in the face of the
power of theatrical managers to ignore the suggestions of their archaeological
advisors, Godwin was “obliged to invent a new role for himself, and indeed for
the modern theatre: that of ‘producer,’ a man endowed with final artistic control
over a whole production, and complete power over the other participants.”167
In the last three years of his life, Godwin succeeded in expanding his role as archaeological
superintendent into direction, production, and management. This was a logical step: Godwin’s stated
aim in 1875 in his Shakespeare articles had been to combine the archaeologically
accurate costume and scenery with the correct historical stage action.168

In his collaborations with
Wilson Barrett, Godwin had been able to make directorial suggestions, but
ultimate authority still lay with Barrett. In the summer of 1884 Godwin took
control of the production, direction, and management of a successful open-air
production of the forest scenes of As You Like It, performed by
Lady Archibald Campbell’s Pastoral Players in Coombe Wood near
Kingston-upon-Thames. Godwin and the Pastoral Players went on to perform
adaptations of John Fletcher’s Faithefull Shepherdesse in
1885, and Tennyson’s Fair Rosamund in 1886, the same year that
Godwin produced, directed, and managed John Todhunter’s Helena in Troas.
Finally, he was in a position to mold whole productions, with only financial
considerations to hamper the creation of the perfect illusion.

In these productions,
Godwin’s archaeology immediately expanded from the static visual ensemble on
stage into stage movement and music. The women of the chorus of Helena
in Troas were rehearsed until they could move gracefully and arrange
themselves into moving, harmonious pictures. A series of line drawings show the
attitudes into which the chorus sank while resting: they are visually striking
and some are recognizable poses from Greek sculpture.169 A surviving
photograph taken during a performance of The Faithfull
Shepherdesse shows the cast paying homage to a statue of Pan.170
Godwin had researched the dances, taking notes from a Roman prose fantasy, The Golden
Ass, by Lucius Apuleius. As for music, in 1875 Godwin had argued
that “there can be no possible excuse if the characteristic music of the age is
omitted when the text or stage business suggests its introduction.171 He
wrote to a Mr. Lawson in March 1884 asking him to help with As You Like
It. “What we want is not only the songs and music … but hunting horn
business played in the real distance & coming nearer … A German Doctor of
music has offered, but before he was accepted I suggested you as
being the true Archaeological musician of the day.”172

Archaeologically speaking, Helena in Troas was the most
ambitious of Godwin’s productions of the 1880s because in it he attempted not
only to create a historically correct picture upon the stage but also to draw
the whole audience into the illusion by re-creating an entire Greek theater
inside Hengler’s Circus in London. In the program Godwin wrote, “My intention has been to
give to the story stage surroundings like those which I suppose a play on such
a subject may have received at Athens or Corinth in the days of Sophocles.”173
In effect, Godwin added another layer to the audience’s perception of the
historical truth of what they saw by placing them inside that truth, in the
position of the historical spectators of the drama.

A reviewer in the Morning Post wrote of the
stage at Hengler’s Circus that “Mr E. W. Godwin had to rely … rather upon
‘inward consciousness’, aided by scholarly tradition, than upon the testimony
of vision, there being no existing example to furnish matter for architectural
illustration,”174 but this was not true. The Odeum of Regilla in Athens, the theater of Herodes
Atticus at Dramyssus, and the great theater at Epidaurus had all been excavated
by 1886. Most importantly, by 1865 the theater of Dionysus had been uncovered
on the Athenian Acropolis, and drawings had been published in Germany,175
though not in Britain. Godwin must have been aware of this discovery: Thomas Henry
Dyer’s Ancient
Athens,176
which was one of Godwin’s sources for his Greek theater, incorporated information
from the excavation. One of Godwin’s correspondents wrote that the whole
subject of Greek theaters needed to be reviewed in the light of the new
information from Athens,177 which tended to cast doubt on Godwin’s other major
source of published information, J.W. Donaldson’s Theatre of the Greeks.178 Godwin followed
Dyer more closely than Donaldson; for example, his stage was between four and
five feet high, as Dyer recommended, rather than twelve feet, as suggested by
Donaldson.179

As for the costumes, Godwin wrote to
Cecil Smith of the British Museum, asking for information about the theatrical masks
worn in Classical Greek theater and about a voice amplifier that he believed
must have been used to allow Classical actors to be heard.180 At this point
in the planning of the production, Godwin seems to have been intending to stage
the play in Greek theatrical costume. Greek actors wore exaggerated, bulky,
padded costumes with masks and stiltlike shoes. To costume his own actors in
this way would have been correct, but obtrusive, unnatural, and stagy. Some
time after March 1886, Godwin stopped looking for authentic Greek theatrical
costume an began instead to design dress correct to the daily life of the time
of the play’s production, with additional notes taken from the Homeric
poems.181 The costumes and masks of the Classical theater abandoned, and in
their place Godwin began to create a hybrid: Classical Greek with Homeric
accents, close to the
spirit of play, which itself a hybrid, but not to the history of the Classical
theater, nor to Homer,
nor to the time of Troy.

Oscar Wilde wrote of Godwin’s
production: “The performance was not intended to be an absolute reproduction of
the Greek stage in the fifth century before Christ: it was simply the presentation
in Greek form of a poem conceived in the Greek spirit; and the secret of its
beauty was the perfect correspondence of form and matter, the delicate
equilibrium of spirit and sense.”182 Godwin had created his “perfect illusion
I long to witness”; it was not historical, although it had its roots in history.
The purpose of archaeology was no longer to fix a play in real time, matching
its individual elements of costume, scenery, and behavior to that time, but to
discover and realize on stage the “spirit” of an age and to harmonize all the
elements with that spirit. The science of archaeology, in other words, had
become merely a springboard for the imagination.

This is akin to what Godwin aimed to
achieve with his architecture. His theory that the architect should study the
principles rather than copy the forms of old buildings often fell down in practice. Nevertheless, the
coherent thread that runs through his career is of design being inspired by but
transcending the scientific study of the past. The “spirit” of an age was not
ultimately recoverable through facts, but through the imagination, and if that
spirit was often
expressed in Godwin’s designs in the idiom of archaeology, it was also
original.

A year before his death Godwin wrote,
“the Archaeologist or Antiquary … is something more than a frequenter of
museums and a patron of pigeon-holes. His method or mental attitude is of
special significance, and you can no more make him off hand than you can make
an artist: indeed he must have some of the artist’s qualities, or, at least, be
able to truly imagine in his mind’s eye the features of the past and interpret
its records and memorials.”183

Note: Most published sources are
cited below in shorted form (author’s last name, abbreviated title, date of
publication); full references will be found in the bibliography. Frequently cited archives
are abbreviated; for a key
to the abbreviations, also see the bibliography.

I would like to thank Fanny Baldwin
and Aileen Reid for information about Godwin’s theatrical and architectural
activities; and Susan Weber Soros, Aileen Reid, Robert Arbuthnott, and Owen Wheatley for
reading and commenting on the draft of this essay.

8.For a description of his early
interest in the history of costume, see Godwin, “Cyclopaedia of Costume” (16
October 1875): 208. ↖

9.“Mr. E.W. Godwin on Architecture
And Somerset Churches” [ca. 1864], lecture by Godwin to the Bristol Society of
Architects, V & A AAD,
4/560-1988: cuttings book [cutting
probably from The Western Daily Press]. ↖

11.Godwin, “On
Some Buildings I have Designed”
(29 November 1878): 210. ↖

12.“I remember
when I was a pupil at Bristol, that two of my contemporaries … were always
sorely troubled when summoned by the master to accompany him in a measuring
expedition” (Godwin, “British Architect Art Club” [19 January 1883]: 32. Godwin may have
been a little unfair in his characterization of Armstrong: the prospective of
Godwin and Hine’s Architectural
Antiquities of Bristol and Its Neighbourhood was issued from Armstrong’s
office in Bristol. Armstrong subscribed to the publication, and Godwin also
acknowledged Armstrong’s help in an article on the Priory of the Dominicans. (I
am grateful to Aileen Reid for this information. CA) ↖

17.Bristol Society of Architects,
“First Annual Report, for the year ending May 1851,” Bristol Society of
Architect Archives. The Civil Engineer
and Architect’s Journal was not exclusively practical, bit its title does
betray its priorities. ↖

22.Godwin, “On Some Buildings I
Have Designed” (29 November 1878): 211. ↖

23.Nesfield, Specimens of Mediaeval Architecture (1862). Godwin knew and approved
of the book as he
awarded it as a prize for Architectural Drawing to a student member of the
Bristol Society of Architects in 1864 (minute book entry dated 4 May 1864, Bristol
Society of Architects). Burges sketches were eventually published in 1870 ([Burges],
Architectural Drawings), but his
visits to France and Italy had taken place in the 1850s and 1860s. Godwin would have seen
the unpublished drawings before 1870. ↖

25.Godwin, “Photographs of the
Architectural Photographic Association,” part I (22 February 1867): 147-48;
part 2 (1 March 1867): 164-66. ↖

26.V & A TA, Godwin collection,
box I. Godwin used a photograph
of the reliefs on the pedestal of the obelisk of Theodosius in the Hippodrome
at Constantinople. This
photograph is an item on the list of “authorities” for Claudian, handwritten inside Godwin’s copy of his privately printed
pamphlet, Godwin, “A Few Notes on … Claudian”
(1883). ↖

27.Godwin wrote, “There was once a
little cross church in Somersetshire of great interest to us. We sketched it,
and measured it, and photographed it till one fine day passing by we found it
had been ‘restored’” [Godwin], Notes On Current Events ([21 May 1880]: 241) G.
E. Street was the culprit who had “restored” it, but the church is
unidentified. Compare Burges on photography—“Measure much, sketch little and
above all, keep your fingers out of chemicals”—quoted in Crook, William Burges (1981): 67. ↖

33.V & A PD,E.225-1963, pp.
105, 107. Godwin had not seen the original manuscript, in Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, until some time after 1857, at which time he wrongly
assumed the original to be in the British Museum (See Godwin, “Antiquarian
Notes and Queries” [April 1857]: 157-58). Wyrcestre (ca. 1415-ca. 1491) was a
Bristol burgess, who surveyed the town, measuring it in paces and published his
notes and measurements. [William de Wyrcestre], Itineraria Simonis Simeonis et Willelmi de Worcestre Quibus accedit
Tractatus de Metro, in quo traduntur regulae, a scriptoribus medii aevi in
versibus Leoninis observatae MSS … , ed J. Nasmith (Cambridge, 1778). ↖

34.RIBA Mss, GoE/7/3/1. Rev. John
Louis Petit (1801-1868) was an architectural writer and artist, as well as
clergyman. ↖

42.Godwin, “Ancient Coffin Slab”
(December 1853): 182-83. For the other seven articles published in the Archaeological Journal see the Bibliography.
Godwin also wrote several articles for the Wiltshire
Archaeological and Natural History Magazine. ↖

43.“Proceedings of Meetings at the
Archaeological Institute” (1851): 322-40. ↖

57.The excursions of the society
and the lectures of Godwin and others were extensively reported in the Western Daily Press, a Bristol
newspaper. Cuttings from the paper are pasted into the minute book of the
Bristol Society of Architects. ↖

58.Godwin, “Bristol Cathedral”
(March 1863): 38-63. This paper was first read in October 1862 at a meeting of the Bristol
Society of Architects. ↖

63.For example, Parker (quoted in
ibid.) had reproduced a page of the manuscript Claud. B.4 in his Domestic Architecture in England and had noted that “there is
considerable doubt whether the representations in Anglo-Saxon Mss. Can be
relied on; also whether they are intended to represent stone buildings or
wooden structures with metal ornaments.” ↖

71.For a report of an extraordinary
meeting for the purpose of presenting Schliemann with a diploma of election as
an honorary member, see “Societies: Royal Institute of British Architects,”
British Architect 7 (4 May 1877): 272. ↖

72.Schliemann’s colleague Wilhelm Dörpfeld
gave an account of the excavations of 1883-84 on the Acropolis of Tiryns that also
tended to cast doubt on Homer, but Godwin dismissed Tiryns as “thoroughly
Eastern,” being unable to match the ground plan of the complex there with
anything he had found in the Iliad or
Odyssey (Godwin, “Greek Home
According to Homer” [June 1886]: 922). Godwin’s notes on Tiryns are in RIBA
Mss, GoE/5/2 (G/GR.2/18/I). His skepticism about Schliemann is also obvious in
one of his sketches of Greek armor, which is annotated: “one of a row of figs
on fragment of Pottery found by Dr Schliemann at Mycenae Don’t believe in it.
EWG. July/83.” ↖

73.Godwin, “Spenser’s Castles,”
part I (27 January 1872): 41-42; part 2 (3 February 1872): 54-55. ↖

74.Godwin, “Kilcolman” (17 August
1872): 91-92 and illus. Several of Godwin’s sketches of Kilcolman Castle are in
RIBA Mss, GoE/6/I. ↖

101.A number of more or less
spurious examples of “Shakespeare” furniture were known in the nineteenth
century. Until 1893 four oak chairs and part of a fifth from Shakespeare’s
birthplace were in the possession of the Hornby family in Stratford on Avon.
Another supposed Shakespeare chair had been removed to Poland in 1790
by Princess Isabel Czartoryska, and another was exhibited at the Philadelphia
Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and subsequently
bought by George Godwin, the editor of the Builder.
(I am grateful to Ann Donnelly, curator of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust,
for this information.) ↖

106.For the two small tables, see V
& A PD, E.233-1963, p. 31. For the washstand, see V & A PD, E.233-1963,
p. 35. ↖

107.For Godwin’s design for the
wall decoration, see V & A
PD, E.241-1963, p. 163; for Godwin’s sketch of the carpet from the Burgomaster Meyer’s Votive Picture, by
Holbein, see V & A PD, E.229-1963, p. 61. The illustration Godwin used came
from the Handbook of Painting: The
German, Flemish, and Dutch Schools. …, part I (1860): 192. ↖

108.For Godwin’s sketch of the jug,
see V & A PD, E.473-1963, verso. The jug is an East Greek oinochoe, of ca. 600-550 B.C., in the British
Museum (Blacas Collection, GR.1867.5-8.925). For Godwin’s design for the toilet
set, see V & A PD, E.233- 1963, p. 27. ↖

110.For Godwin’s design for a
frieze of tiles, see V & A PD, E.377-1963. For the sketches made by Godwin
in 1866 from the Arundel Psalter, see V & A PD, E.285-1963, p. 9. For
Godwin’s suggestions for diapers and “powderings,” see Godwin, “Painted
Decoration,” part 10 (19 July 1867): 491, and part II (18 October
1867): 716. ↖

114.For the book and sketches on
armor, see RIBA Mss, GoE/5/2 (G/Gr.2/J9-20). The book on Irish antiquities was
to be illustrated with a vast number of sketches, some of which were published
in the British Architect (1880-81),
with the editor commenting that it was a “store … we are not likely to be able
to exhaust” (Notes on Current Events, ↖

“Three Irish Crosses” [26 November
1880]: 228). Godwin’s draft manuscript, notes, and some of the sketches are in
RIBA GoE/4/6/1-9. For the catalogue, see letter from Godwin to W. C. Angus, dated 13
August 1884, V & A TA,
Godwin collection box 3.

121.[Godwin], “Notes On Current
Events” (16 April 1880): 183; also, Godwin, “Theatrical Jottings: Shakspere [sic] at the Imperial” (19 March 1880):
134; Paul Lacroix, Manners Customs and
Dress during the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance period (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1874). ↖

130.Arundel 38 is the manuscript of
Thomas Hoccleve’s poem “De Regimine Principium” written ca. 1411-12. The only
illumination in it is on p. 37 and represents Hoccleve (or possibly Chaucer)
presenting a poem to King Henry V. For the Costume Society drawing, see V &
A TA, Godwin collection, box 4. ↖

158.Godwin, “A Few Notes on … ‘Claudian’”
(7 December 1883): 267-70. The pamphlet was privately printed in 1883. There is
a copy in the British Library and another, annotated with a handwritten list of
“Authorities,” in V & A TA, Godwin collection, box 1. ↖

160.For the costumes of Claudian he used illustrations of the
consular diptychs which he had found in Antonio Francese Gori, Thesaurian Veterium Diptichorum
(Florence, 1759); for images of the disc of Theodosius I he used Antonio Delgado,
Memoria Histórico (Madrid, 1849).
Godwin consulted both books at the British Library on 24 September 1883 and
kept his library slips (V & A AAD, 4/24-25-1988). He annotated the Delgado slip: “Very Beautiful large outline
plates of the silver disc of Theodosius.” ↖

161.Letter from A. S. Murray to
Godwin, dated 14 September 1883,V & A TA, Godwin collection, box 1. For
Louis-Georges Seroux d’Agincourt’s Histoire
de l’Art, Murray recommended the German edition (n.d.) edited by Mast, pl. 10. (I have not
been able to find a copy of this edition.) ↖

175.Souder, “E. W. Godwin and the
Visual Theatre” (1976): 109. (There is a copy in the Theatre Museum, Covent Garden,
London. I am indebted to Alvin Souder’s thesis for much of the information in
this section on Godwin’s production of Helena
in Troas.) ↖

180.“I have looked through all the authorities
I know upon the Greek Stage arrangements and cannot find any trace of the voice
strengthener of which you speak” (letter from Cecil Smith to Godwin, dated 2 March
1886, V & A TA,
Godwin collection, box 6). ↖